Think you just need a budget?
Budgeting tools like Monarch (new/very impressive), Mint (RIP), EveryDollar, You Need a Budget (YNAB), and others can track spending transactions just fine. There are many apps like these, and they can all tell you what you did with your money.
These apps have a budgeting feature to define spending and savings goals, then compare actual spending to these goals. This planning process helps us decide what we want to do—just like it is a good idea to look at a map before jumping in the car for a long trip.
What is missing from all these apps, however, is course correction—guidance about how to get back on track when our actual spending doesn’t match our best intentions. Instead, they tell us that we have run off the road, without providing any hints about how to get back. If the GPS app we used for our road trip had limitations like this, it would stop working if we took a wrong turn. That’s not very useful, is it?
If my GPS behaved like the typical budgeting app, it would stop working as soon as I took a wrong turn.
You need a Thinking Budget … and a FORECAST
When spending doesn’t go according to plan, I find myself slogging through a forecasting spreadsheet to work out how to get back on track. It means re-entering the data my budgeting app already has, just to see the impact on my future cash flow and calculate the adjustments to compensate. It’s a profoundly frustrating and inefficient use of my time.
A spreadsheet can run the “what-if” calculations needed to steer future spending back toward your goals. But just because it can, that doesn’t make it a good use of our time — it’s repetitive drudgery.
Our budgeting tool should be able to provide this guidance from the transaction data it already has. We already expect these tools to download our transactions automatically. Shouldn’t we expect our budgeting app to be smart enough to tell us how to adjust our spending behavior — in real time — to help us get back on track?
This isn’t rocket science, and we shouldn’t be poring over spreadsheets. Our budgeting app should be able to instantly provide the guidance we need to adjust our spending habits and get back on track.
Now in Early Access: Thinking Budget
The goal is simple: a budget app that works—fully—for real people. It helps us navigate the real-life spending events that derail our plans — unexpected expenses, spending mistakes, the unpredictable. It respects our time by pulling its full weight on the number-crunching and forecasting, and it guides us through the course corrections that are a natural part of our real financial world.
Built for everyone
Thinking Budget saves everyone time and helps them take control of their spending — at any stage of their financial journey. It shines brightest when life gets complicated: juggling a mortgage, college savings, debt payoff, vacations, car repairs, kid braces, home repairs, medical bills. But the same intelligence that untangles a complicated month makes a simple one effortless, too.
It’s guided by the latest science behind driving behavior change, plus sophisticated software logic that does the heavy lifting — so you can behave as brilliantly as you intend. You don’t see these capabilities in other tools because it is hard. Really hard.
This isn’t another app that just shows you where the money went. It’s built to help you do something about it — and to get you back on track when life gets in the way.
Most budgeting apps will help you create the ideal budget plan, but Thinking Budget will actively help you adjust your spending to achieve your financial goals.
If this sounds like what you’ve been waiting for, get early access below — just your email, no credit card.
P.S. We will never share your contact information with anyone. Ever. Period. (Privacy matters.)